looked round. ‘My mother likes lilies.’
‘Lilies!’ Nick spat on the floor. ‘I hate lilies! Anything except lilies! They are vulgar; for the dead! I hate them!’
‘Look, Nick,’ Jez intervened, ‘we’re actually here for something a bit more bespoke.’
Nick’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that right?’
‘We’ll make it worth your while.’
‘I don’t know,’ Nick shifted a pile of eucalyptus away from some bunches of sweet peas. ‘I don’t need to do that kind of thing any more. I’ve mixed my last scent! Things are good. I’m even expanding the business.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s what you tell me. But I don’t see any gardenias, Nick. Business can’t be that great. You used to be rolling in them in the good old days.’
‘Gardenias,’ Nick’s voice softened and his eyes glazed over. ‘The queens of flowers! It’s true. I haven’t smelt a gardenia in a long time.’
‘Come on, Nick. Do the job right and you can fill the shop top to bottom with gardenias if you like!’
Nick weighed up the offer.
‘I haven’t done it in a long time,’ he warned.
‘You’re the king! You’ll never lose your touch! I’ll never forget the first one you did for me,’ Jez laughed. ‘Remember, we actually had to tone it down because it was so potent! I couldn’t move an inch without some woman accosting me!’
‘All right! All right! Just this once!’ Nick shut the shop door and turned the sign around to read ‘Closed.’ ‘But I’m charging double,’ he added, pushing them both towards a steep staircase at the back. ‘Quick, before Ricki gets back.’
‘Who’s that?’ Jez asked.
‘My assistant. Does landscaping; a very talented gardener. She’ll kill me if she knows I’m mixing scent on the side. You have no idea how it takes over your life. It’s an obsession!’
Downstairs, past the piles of ribbons, wrapping paper and refrigerators filled with fresh blooms, there was a small, lopsided blue door. Nick pushed it open and turned on the light. As they stepped inside, Hughie could see it was a sort of laboratory, with a long wooden work table covered in test-tubes, bottles and Bunsen burners; its walls filled with narrow shelves upon which hundreds of tiny vials were stored in alphabetical order.
He scanned the rows. ‘Amber, ground’, ‘Apple Peel: Green’, ‘Armpit: Female’. ‘Baby hair: blond’, ‘Burnt matches’, ‘Butterscotch: cheap’ … on and on they went.
‘I see you’ve been stocking up,’ Jez observed.
Nick sniffed. ‘A man’s got a right to keep his cabinets full if he wants to. Sit down, you two.’ He pointed to a couple of stools. ‘You great big louts take up all the air!’
Jez winked at Hughie, who balanced uneasily, clutching his packages. This was hardly what he’d imagined when Jez said they were going to get him some scent and he found it more than a little disconcerting to be in the hands of a man who collected baby hair.
First Nick scrubbed his hands with scalding water and a wire brush. It was painful to watch. Afterwards, he put on his glasses and asked Hughie to lean over. Then he buried his nose in the back of Hughie’s neck (an event which traumatized Hughie for months afterwards) and inhaled.
‘Ah! The boy eats almost entirely red meat! Has the digestion of an ox! Young, healthy, and very, very virile!’ he smiled, tilting his chin down to peer over the top of his glasses. ‘Hummm … an interesting mix … much more intriguing than I’d guessed!’
Then he began pulling down various vials, lining them up on the work top. ‘Sand: Indian Ocean’, ‘Moss: Amazon’, ‘Black Earth: Yorkshire’, ‘Liquorice’, ‘Icing Sugar’, ‘Pomegranate’, ‘Pavement: Cleveland, Ohio’, ‘Pavement: Paris’, ‘Fresh Fig’, ‘Lime Flower’, ‘Old Cashmere Coat’, ‘Coffee Bean: Venice’ …
He tutted slightly and put ‘Coffee Bean: Venice’ back, replacing it with ‘Coffee Grounds: Brooklyn.’
Hughie was uncertain if he should be offended or not.
And then he began mixing.
Jez leant back. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
Nick glared at him.
‘Only joking!’ Jez laughed. ‘God, these divas! Hey, I’ll bet you didn’t know you were in the presence of the greatest perfume nose in history, did you? Nicolai the Nose Verbronsky! The toast of Paris, Moscow, New York, Rome! The undisputed king of the fragrance world for nearly thirty years.’
‘So why are you selling flowers in Islington?’ Hughie asked.
‘Yes,’ Nick measured out a single drop of ‘Pavement: Paris’ into a glass beaker. ‘Yes, you might well wonder such a thing! I do!’
‘Oh, how the mighty are fallen! Tell him, Nick. I’ll bet he’s too young to remember.’
Nick winced as if the memory pained him. But all the while he spoke, he continued mixing. ‘It happened at the height of my powers. I was experimenting a lot with odours at the time.’ He gave Hughie a look. ‘I’m assuming you know the difference between a scent and an odour; an odour is stronger, unpleasant.’
Hughie nodded.
‘Well, I was working for a certain house in Paris – this was in the early eighties. They were desperate for something revolutionary. Pass the “Sand”, please.’
Jez obliged.
‘And they happened upon my experiments. I wanted to see if you could take an essentially offensive smell and mix it in such a way that it would become irresistible. Well, they took one sniff and went insane!’
He stopped a moment, tilted the beaker on its side, poured half its contents down the drain, and continued.
‘Of course, it was only a test; it wasn’t meant to be quite so strong. But they stole it from me before it was ready. We argued and they kicked me out; disowned me.’ Tears welled up in his grey eyes. Taking off his glasses, he dabbed them with a bit of paper towel.
‘Hey, take it easy, man.’ Jez patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’s over now.’
Nick shrugged him off. ‘It was one of the worst perfume crimes in history! For nearly a decade every female on the face of the planet reeked of the stuff. It was overwhelming! Unbearable! A dark time. A very dark time!’
For a while he sat very still, staring at the table.
‘You’ve heard of the perfume Venom,’ Jez explained softly.
Hughie couldn’t help himself. ‘Oh, dear!’
‘Yes, I’m responsible!’ Nick turned on him. ‘It was me, OK? And from that day on I vowed I’d never mix another perfume again!’
‘But
